Skepticism

EVENTS

Ray Bradbury — not in June!

Something offends me about the fact that Ray Bradbury has died in June — October would have been more appropriate, with the ground covered with dead leaves that swished as you walked through them, and the sound of a train in the distance as twilight settles and lovely dark things stir in the greyness.

“Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

I started reading SciFi right around 1960 when I was 13. Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl, and of course Ray Bradbury. I’m convinced that their stories, especially ones like Fahrenheit 451, have shaped the rest of my life. It’s been a shame to lose a lot of those great writers, dare I say ‘philosophers’ really, but I have to say that Bradbury making it to age 91 was pretty damn good. We won’t all get that many years alloted to us.

I don’t read a lot of SF or fantasy these days, but Bradbury was a biggie for me when I was a teenager. I don’t think he had published anything for a long time, and I’ve never quite understood the Fahrenheit 9/11 flap with Michael Moore, but I am still saddened. He had a lyric quality few, if any, SF writers could match.

We should remember that Bradbury did not consider himself a genre writer: he wrote what he liked and damn classification. If anything, he classed himself as a fantasy writer:

Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see? That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time—because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.

I didn’t care for his political views, but he was a great, thought provoking writer.

I wrote to him a few years ago asking for permission to use one of his stories, “the scythe” as the basis for an animated film i wanted to make. I expected a form letter in response but instead got a very nice personal letter from the man (though I was disappointed that the gist of the letter was that the rights to that story were tied up and unavailable). I haven’t opened one of his books in a very long time (love the short stories, but never cared much for his novels, truth be told) but I may have to crack “Martian Chronicles” or “The October Country” tonight.

“Dad!” He blurted it out. “Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes…”

His father didn’t even turn. “Suppose you tell me why you need a new pair of sneakers. Can you do that?”

“Well…”

It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the hot covers in wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with refraction, than the real part of you above water.

“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”

Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.

I just read The Sound of Summer Running from Dandelion Wine to my wife. Like a lot of people, she’d never heard of Bradbury’s happier work.

I’d like to imagine Ray Bradbury arriving at the afterlife on a June morning, and being given a new pair of Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes.

I wept for the sorrow of my loss when Asimov died and when death came to Heinlein, Sturgeon, Vonnegut, Clarke and so many more SF writers who helped me to forge my awareness and carve out my compassion and build my joy in this short, brutal life.

Again I weep, this time for my loss of Ray Bradbury. Not for his dying, oh, no. Such is to be expected for all. The tears are because I can no longer take for granted that he, like the others, are no longer active agents in my world, ready to guide and inform me, to take me beyond my small life with new tales, unique visions, unexpected poetry.

What is the saving wonder and the greater value is that in a few days I’ll realize that he has not really gone. His body of work is as alive as he ever was. In the weeks and months to come new bought volumes of his will sleep on my chest as I dream of elegant sailing ships and circus tents. He will most definitely live on in a very real way that we also can achieve because he shows us ourselves, shows us how.

Ray and the ones mentioned above may have gone before us but they will always remain a step ahead of us, gently calling, leading us along a narrow road through a misty night, pointing to the faint glimmer ahead. And always, always, even if annoyingly so, holding a mirror to our faces.

Someday, long past my knowing, someone will open a hot dog stand on Mars. I’ve no doubt that it will be called Ray’s Place or something very similar. I hope that some descendant of mine will step in for a dog and a brew and understand just why it has such a name.

So long, old friend. And thanks for sharing what you saw. You made me larger.

#38- That is an interesting idea…I’d never thought of using such extracts as flavourants before. I hesitate, because I wonder how much flavour is actually in one of those things, and I’m reluctant to help fund people who sell such things as if they were actually medicinal.

Back in the mid 60s my English Lit class were given a choice of three sets of books for half of our O level (O & C board UK exams for 5th formers, age 15-16) course. We all chose the SF set comprising Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos and H G Wells’ The Time Machine. I had always liked SF but that English Lit course really turned me on to Bradbury’s works in a big way, so inevitable as death is, it is still sad news.